Friday, February 27, 2015

About the Las Vegas murder

At first, the death by handgun bullet of Tammy Meyers in Las Vegas seemed to be a simple case of road rage. Meyers was teaching her 15-year-old daughter to drive, and the story was that their car, with the younger woman at the wheel, was involved in some near-collision with another car, and the situation escalated to a point at which the unknown driver of the other car chased the Meyers women to their home and shot the mother in the head.

And then, it didn't happen to have happened that way, although that's how the initial report from Robert Meyers, husband of the deceased, had it. He said he was confused when he left out the details, such as that the women came home angry after some confrontation with a neighbor, rounded up their 22-year-old son, and went back out in pursuit of the other party, leading to two separate gunfights. The final gunfight took place at the Meyers home, and Mrs Meyers was in fact shot at that time.

The 19-year-old neighbor, Erich Milton Nowsch, appeared in court on Monday but has not entered a plea yet. His attorney, Conrad Claus, says Nowsch feared for his life and acted in self-defense.

Police and prosecutors are saying that the Meyers family gave conflicting information, misleading suspect descriptions, and incomplete information. For instance, they claimed that it was some tall random stranger, while in fact, Nowsch is a smallish sort of guy who lives around the corner and was well known to the Meyerses. The late Tammy Meyers used to slip him a twenty when he showed up claiming hunger and would routinely admonish him to pull his pants up when she saw him affecting a gangster persona at the local park.

So who knows what happened, anyway? A mistake by a novice driver? Aggressive driving by Nowsch? A long-standing dispute or a flashpoint disagreement with horrible consequences?

So sad, so avoidable

Whatever happens when the courts shake this all out, one thing remains certain: had Tammy Meyers and her daughter returned home and let either time or the police handle it, there would likely have been no murder. But acting like an old western in which cowboys ran to the saloon and rounded up a posse to mount up and chase after the Dalton Gang is not bound to end up well.

You could ask the Meyers family about that. Her son's defiant statement, "I did what I had to do to protect my mother" left out the possibility that he might have protected her more by staying home and acting reasonably.